Pompeo: U.S. Will Send Migrants Back to Mexico ‘Full Throttle’

President Donald Trump’s deal with Mexico will allow officials to return migrants to Mexico at “full throttle,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared June 10.

He said:

Those crossing the U.S. southern border to seek asylum will be rapidly returned to Mexico where they may await their adjudication of their asylum claims. We’ve seen this before. We were able to do this to the tune of a couple of hundred people per day [before the deal].

We now have the capacity to do this full throttle and engage this in a way that will make a fundamental difference in the calculus for those [migrants] deciding to transit Mexico to try to get into the United States. This full-blown effort under the Migration Protocols [Remain in Mexico] is a big deal and was something that we worked on very, very diligently with our Mexican counterparts over two days. And we will pursue other cooperative efforts too.

The Remain in Mexico policy allows Trump’s border agencies to bypass the “catch and release” policy imposed by Congress and the courts. In the last three months, this federal policy has allowed roughly 350,000 Central American adults and children into U.S. workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods while they wait for court dates to plead their weak legal cases for humanitarian asylum.

Under the Trump deal, new migrants will be sent back to Mexico until they can be bussed to their asylum court hearings in the United States. The return policy will likely wreck the cartels’ labor trafficking business, which depends on migrants’ confidence that they can get U.S. jobs to repay their smuggling debts.

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